NEWS OF THE WEEK EDUCATION
JUDGING TEACHERS Report lays out best way to measure and encourage teaching effectiveness
M
ANY INSTITUTIONS WANT
to improve undergraduate teaching but don't know how to assess it or provide
motivation for improvements. The National Research Council has gathered the answers in a report, "Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, En-
gineering, and Mathematics" (http://national-academies.org). Stuffed with advice and references, the report discusses the roles of administrators, faculty, and students in improving student learning and enhancing faculty teaching skills. Mechanisms for evaluating the quality of research in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are "highly developed, and academic scientists and engineers often derive reward and recognition from their research achievements," the report notes. By contrast, "teaching is less closely scrutinized and less clearly rewarded." So t h e r e p o r t suggests t h a t "scholarly activities that focus on improving teaching and learning should be recognized as bona fide endeavors that are equivalent to other scholarly pursuits."
T h a t may be overly o p t i mistic, but the report does offer other more practical guidance. One topic covered extensively is teaching evaluation by students and peers. Many evaluation techniques don't give enough weight to how much students have learned. "Instead," the report says, "the measure of a teacher's effort often is reduced to the number of courses he or she teaches, the number of students taught, or grade distributions. These are not measures of outcomes and results." More informative evaluations can be built up from feedback from peers, teaching assistants, and student consultants who have attended a faculty member's lectures and filled out forms like the examples provided in the report; students' ability to paraphrase a lecture's key points; and the relative tendency of the faculty member's students to major in the professor's field. And ideas for improvements can be gleaned from college teaching centers, professional societies, and techniques as simple as videotaping a professor's lecture.—SOPHIE WILKINSON
C 6 H 1 3 CHO
SYNTHESIS
CaH9NH2
Remarkable Complexity From One Pot
A
new domino process transforms five components into a hexasubstituted benzene that resembles natural products with interesting biological activities. The process delivers seven chemical bonds and five elements of diversity from one pot. Chemists Pierre Janvier and Jieping Zhu at the National Center for Scientific Research, Gifsur-Yvette, France, and Hugues Bienaymé at Chrysalon, a start-up drug-discovery-support company based in Villeurbanne, France, accomplished this feat by developing conditions in which the three-component synthesis of an oxazole is compatible with two subsequent cycloaddition reactions [Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 41, 4291 (2002)]. In domino processes, bond-forming transformations take place under the same reaction conditions, and subsequent transformations are the
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NOVEMBER
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consequence of the functionality formed in the previous one. Domino processes are "attracting considerable attention because they enable rapid assembly of complex molecules in one pot," notes Albert Padwa, a chemistry professor at Emory University. The work of the French chemists "provides a very interesting example, where highly functionalized polyheterocycles can be prepared by a novel five-component domino process," he tells C&EN. Simple to operate and giving good yields, the sequence Zhu and coworkers developed is highly adaptable to diversity-oriented parallel synthesis. They have prepared a range of polyheterocycles with three different amines, three aldehydes, one isocyanoacetamide, two pentafluorophenyl 3-arylprop-2-ynoates, and three dienophiles as starting materials. Yields range from 32 to 67%.-MAUREEN ROUHI
0
C6H5CH2
k
^
0
-COC 6 F 5
O ^ M ^ O
I C6H5
One pot
Camphorsulfonic acid (10%)
67% yield
HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
